Bad Girls Gone Good

I’ve scarcely shared my history on here for good reason, when I began writing Black Label Logic, I wanted it to be as absent of Ethos and Pathos as possible, as my goal was (and still is) to remain as objective, rational and empirical as possible in my writing. Constant utilization of ethos and pathos would make this blog about me, not about the message. While I have shared statistics from my own life a couple of times, such as The Tinder Experiment, or on my twitter feed in the thread where I shared my Tinder Statistics from the last 30 days, I would say that for the most part I’ve been able to stay within the bounds of pure and practical reason.

This has been a major goal of mine because quite frankly the world of intersexual dynamics, dating, romance, and sex is filled with people who fling their opinions at the wall, hoping something will stick all the while purporting to be “empirical and logical”.

Permit me to draw a distinction first, I once dated a psychiatrist who was fond of saying “Schizophrenics are very logical“, at first she did it to tease me, but after spending some time talking to some patients in deep psychosis, I realized that if I bought into their delusion as a first principle, for instance accepting that the KGB has them as a target, that they were born Napoleon Bonaparte or that astrology is real, then everything from that faulty premise is perfectly internally logically consistent.

In a sense that is what I’ve made a large part of my writing about here on Black Label Logic, the use of statistics to take a field that is largely internally logically consistent and reality test the basic premises by way of using statistics. A second major part has been taking those premises and extrapolating from them using economic models in a “If we assume X to be true, this would conform to Y model, which we could observe in Z variable“.

For instance, if Hypergamy is true in that that there is a dual strategy, prioritized differently based product and market conditions, where one outcome (alpha fucks) is prioritized over the other (beta bucks), then one should be able to observe this through variables such as average age of marriage and number of sexual partners. Average age of marriage because one desires to remain on the market as long as possible in the hopes of a better deal, and number of sexual partners due to trading up being more socially accepted, and we see just that.

However, in order to do such writing, is must understand how things are defined, in the name of this essay, how does one draw the distinction?

What is a Good Girl?

If one things of a set “Girls”, it has two sub-sets “Good Girls” and “Bad Girls”, these two sets share many variables, after all they are both children of the set “Girls”, so they probably shares most of their variables. However, in the interest of clarity let us begin.

We’ll start with the simplest of questions, what are the empirical variables one can use to discern which sub-set a a girl belongs to?

Can we use notch count, meaning the number of men she has slept with? According to my data in “The Chalice and The Crucible” 55% of women in the UK ages 25 – 34 have had more than 5 partners, with 35% of them having had more than 10, is anyone with less than 7.5 partners a “Good girl”, she did sleep with 7 men and gave one man a blow job, but she didn’t have as many partners as the 10+ girls that made up 35%. Then again, 45% of women in the UK ages 25 – 34 have had less than 5, so by that metric the 7.5% girl is a bit on the bad side isn’t she? However, what does that make the ones in the top category with more than 20 partners, how about those with over 30 or 40?

Perhaps we could do it by sex act engaged or positions used, so missionary only means a real good girl, but if she’s done doggystyle or god forbid woman on top she’s obviously a bad girl because she gets into the sex way too much. However, doesn’t notch count become a factor here? What if she’s only ever done missionary but she’s had 100 partners? What if she pulls the “loophole” so she’s technically a virgin, but she’s had anal sex, or what if she’s never had anal or vaginal sex but she blew like 80 dudes?

Does context matter at all? What if she’s lets say 30, started dating at 15, and has had 15, 1 year long relationships, and thus 15 sex partners but they were all in a committed relationship? Does that make her a bad girl, a girl bad at finding a stable partner, or those 15 men scum for playing her for a year? What if she’s 30, was a virgin until 29, then just hammered out 15 men in a year, or hell what if she banged those 15 when she was 15, then stayed celibate for the next 15 years?

What about non-sex related things, does her political opinions matter? I mean sure, that would make it a bit easier, after all if all good girls are conservative, religious girls that does give us something to go on, but how conservative? Are we talking slightly left of center family values conservatives, or “privatize the army” conservative? How religious? are we talking attends Church a couple of days a month or prays 5 times a week and went on a 12 month pilgrimage religious?

This might seem odd that I’m asking all these questions, but I’m seriously trying to understand what makes a girl good and what makes a girl bad. What makes a woman, a quality woman? After all, if such a thing as a quality woman exists, that by implication means that such a thing as a “low quality woman” exists. What makes the difference between a Whole Foods woman and a Wal-Mart woman? Is it that the low quality woman was made in China and has traces of lead? At least that would be measurable. Is it that the Whole Foods woman comes with a side of kale and smells like $45 Avocado toast?

What if a girl has 2 kids by 2 different men and is raising them as a single mom, as a souvenir from the days when she was a groupie for ZZ-Top and travelled with the band in a drug-laced haze back and forth across the continent but she’s now found god, discovered that bras exist and learned how to make tea without burning the water, is she a quality woman or just a Bad girl gone good?

Summary and Conclusions

For those of you who made it this far and are sitting there, scratching your heads, wondering what I ended up drinking last night and what the fuck happened, here is the explanation. If you go back to the beginning of this essay, I put forth the following:

I once dated a psychiatrist who was fond of saying “Schizophrenics are very logical”, at first she did it to tease me, but after spending some time talking to some patients in deep psychosis, I realized that if I bought into their delusion as a first principle, for instance accepting that the KGB has them as a target, that they were born Napoleon Bonaparte or that astrology is real, then everything from that faulty premise is perfectly internally logically consistent.

What I meant to point out with this anecdote was that it’s very easy to build a subjective trap, that once you fall into it, it’s very hard to get out. Anyone who has dated a BPD woman knows that the tangled webs they weave, have a way of drawing you into their version of reality which replaces actual reality. In game there is a similar concept named “The Adventure Bubble” which is an alternate reality that you draw a girl into as part of the seduction process. Within the bubble you need to maintain suspension of disbelief so you don’t break the illusion, but you can play more or less any game you want.

The way you break the adventure bubble is to introduce reality, much like the way you end a BPD illusion is hitting rock bottom during a discard phase. The way you end illusions is to require empirical data and metrics.

So this is my challenge, and the challenge you should present to anyone who uses the “Good Girl” vs. “Bad Girl” dichotomy, the “Quality woman” vs. “Low-quality woman”: Define by an empirical, quantitative metric what makes a girl a “bad girl” or a “low quality woman”.

A note:

I recently launched a Patreon page where I will be posting additional content every month for those who support me and I will do a Google Hangout for the highest tier Patrons (limited to 10 people).

I’ve also had some requests for consults, which I’ve declined up until now, but due to demand I’ve chosen to open up for doing some consults on request. For details please check out my Consulting and Patreon Page

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9 comments on “Bad Girls Gone Good”

“I can’t express a classification algorithm in terms of simple 1st order logic applied to 1 or 2 variables, therefore Imma throw my hands up and say classification is impossible”. Lobertarians do this a lot.

How can you tell Beethoven from Justin Timberlake? How can you tell a picture of a cat from a picture of a waterfall? Most people can. Even animals and computers can do it. In the latter case, you can even get at the formal representation of the algorithm, but it will never be something that can be easily expressed in a paragraph.

TL;DR – just because you can’t easily tell what distinguishes a good vs bad woman doesn’t mean there is no clear difference, and that people can’t informally tell which is which.

That’s the point exactly, can you tell a difference, sure. However, the problem becomes when people use such subjective, informal judgments as rhetorical devices in a debate founded on empiricism and reason. Can you tell Beethoven from Justin Timberlake? Sure, can you say which one is good or which one is bad?

Can you tell a picture of a cat from a picture of a waterfall? Naturally, is the computer or the animal able to tell you which one is quality? Not so much.

The key being that such judgments are inherently subjective and thus in the realms of aesthetics, ethics and to some extent metaphysics rather than in empiricism and logic. You can use logic to formulate an iron clad syllogism for why chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla, you can use statistics, surveys, interviews, representative samples or experiment to determine which is most beautiful and which is most ugly, the picture of the cat or the picture of the waterfall, but in the end it’s a matter of taste and preference.

However, if you insist on debating me on the proposition “Chocolate is better than vanilla” I’m well within my rights to demand that you define the criteria of which we judge “better” and your definition of “better”.

This is no different than demanding that if people insist on using classification schemes such as “Good Girl”, “Bad Girl”, “Quality woman” and “Low Quality Woman” furthermore, act as if such schemes are objective, well-defined and the interaction between variables understood and quantified, that they do the work and define them.

Now, I’m not saying classification is impossible, I’m saying a classification we all can objective agree upon is correct is most likely impossible. Every guy who ever got married thought he was marrying a good girl and a quality woman, yet 70% of divorces are initiated by women, would a “good girl” and a “quality woman ever divorce her husband”.

Everything that involves humans necessarily has some degree of subjectivity. You won’t get a fully objective definition even for relatively simple concepts like “blue” or “pain”. There is, though, a hierarchy of subjectivity. The preference for chocolate vs vanilla ice cream is much more subjective than the preference for chocholate ice cream vs a plate of feces. Clearly then, even “rational, empirical” discussion can tolerate use of somewhat subjective concepts as long as they are not so subjective so as to fall into the “chocholate vs vanilla” category.

I believe the Good/Bad girl distinction is sufficiently objective so as not to be dismissed, even if men may not be able to articulate exactly what they mean, and even if they sometimes (or often) fail to correctly recognize good vs bad women. To continue the animal analogy, it is an agreed-upon objective fact that cats make an effort to seek quality in their food and avoid poison, even though any individual cat’s choices still show an infamous amount of subjectivity and even outright error.

Even though animals they can’t explain (or even conceptualize) their choices, sometimes we can get a rough idea of the criteria at work through observation or deduction. When peacock females routinely pick the peacock male with the biggest tail for mating, we can infer that a) the females are interested in maximizing the fitness of the mate (since they are subject to the forces of evolution like any other animal), and b) that the tail has something to do with it, and likely acts as a signal of the male’s fitness.

It’s important here to distinguish between the classes (i.e. our concept of the possible result of the classification process: “fit mate” vs “unfit mate” or even a fitness score) and the features (i.e. the outward signs we use to infer which class an entity belongs to, in this case the size of the male peacock’s tail at the very least). Note that the classes are usually set apart by the different effects they produce when chosen. A cat distinguishes between “food” and “poison” because one produces the continuation of its life, the other produces death. Similarly, “fit” and “unfit” mates produce a markedly different result for the animal’s genetic future.

If we apply this process to men declaring certain women to be “Good” or “Bad”, I think we can get an idea of what they really mean. A “bad” woman is one that, absent any extreme efforts on part of the male, is very likely to cause trouble, where by “trouble” we mean any one of the most frequent ways in which a relationship fails and causes the male harm (i.e. divorce, drama, psychopathic behavior, humiliation). A “good” woman is one for which this is thought unlikely, a woman that will generally follow the uncomplicated script that men have in mind when considering a relationship: produce kids, stay together, not cause trouble. That’s it really.

Two final observations that may help shape conversation with men in light of my theory:

– These criteria are vague, and that’s indeed the point. We are talking about the classes, i.e. the general expected result of engaging with the woman. When men refer specifically to the number of partners, virginity, life history etc., they are simply confusing the features for the classes. The concepts of “Good” and “Bad” woman are valid, what’s not valid is creating a simple relationship between the value of a feature (no. of partners) and a “good” or “bad” verdict. Men could be encouraged to understand the difference between these outward signs vs what they are truly seeking for (i.e. no trouble).

– The existence of a class does not guarantee the real-life existence of objects that fit it. It may be that no “Good” women actually exist. In this case one should try to express this idea specifically, rather than challenge the concept of “Good” women itself.

You are getting somewhere now, as I requested in the original essay, we have to define the constructs, which you just did. If we utilize your definitions of good vs. bad woman as
Bad: “A “bad” woman is one that, absent any extreme efforts on part of the male, is very likely to cause trouble, where by “trouble” we mean any one of the most frequent ways in which a relationship fails and causes the male harm (i.e. divorce, drama, psychopathic behavior, humiliation).”

Good: “A “good” woman is one for which this is thought unlikely, a woman that will generally follow the uncomplicated script that men have in mind when considering a relationship: produce kids, stay together, not cause trouble.”

Now we’ve defined the classes which is what I requested in the first place, in terms of probability. A good woman is one with a low probability of causing trouble for the desired outcome, a bad woman is one with a high probability of causing trouble for the desired outcome. If we go by fairly standard risk measurement, it’s probability and impact. I think it would be unrealistic to say that a good woman would never cause trouble, so we cannot set the probability to zero, however it would be reasonable to say that as you defined “divorce, drama, psychopathic behavior, humiliation” as examples of behavior that makes a girl bad, that the trouble caused by a good girl would be of lesser impact than those, thus we can conceptualize the two as:

Good Girl: Low probability of causing trouble, but causes trouble that has low impact.
Bad Girl: High probability of causing trouble, but causes trouble that has high impact.

These are naturally the extreme outlier cases. If one were to conceptualize a normal distribution, the Good Girls as defined above (low probability/Low impact) are one outlier, the Bad Girls (High probability, High impact) are the other outliers and all other women lay somewhere along the distribution, clustered around the mean. In this distribution we would have Bad Girls (negative outlier), decent girls (mean) and Good Girls (positive outlier) and a range of girls in between these 3 categories.

However, this is when we arrive at your two final observations, the criteria are vague and to some degree dependent on preceding definitions, for instance, you had to define both good girl and bad girl, in addition to the desired outcome for your definition to work. Namely the script “Long-term relationship with children” and the traits that would make a woman a good partner for such “not cause trouble”. You also defined trouble by outlining your bad girl definition with traits that would be negative for such a long-term union (divorce, drama, psychopathic behavior, humiliation).

I agree with your final statement, and this was somewhat the point I was making, that depending on how exhaustive you make the list of observable traits and features it would necessarily increase or decrease “market size”. For instance, if one puts “virgin” as a criteria, that limits the market to women who have not had sex. If we limit it to “25 and younger” that further reduces the market and so on. The second point I was attempting to make is that the complete list of features a man designs in his head, in your case a fairly simple one “divorce, psychopathic behavior, drama, humiliation” will be a determinant in limiting the amount of women that belong to one of the 3 categories, this is where it becomes very complicated.

For instance, a woman with children from a previous relationship, where she initiated divorce would technically put her at a higher risk of future divorces, however what if the man she was with cheated on her constantly? In my book constant cheating would be an “extreme effort on the part of the male” but what if the man only cheated on her once? What is the cut-off? The existence of a class requires not only that we be able to define what belongs to that class, but also by elimination what does not belong to it.

In your case, there are strings of rather subjective judgements all built on sand.

“Extreme efforts on the part of the male” hinges on the definition of “extreme”, there is a shared definition of this term “reaching a high or the highest degree; very great.” is this cheating on you once, always or somewhere in between?

“Drama” as a trait that causes trouble hinges on both degree of drama (some is always expected) and frequency, constant vs. intermittent for instance.

“Psychopathic behavior”, are we talking can be diagnosed by the PCL-R? At we talking to any degree what so ever, or is there is a certain level that serves as a cutoff and what is this level?

“Humiliation”, public, private, is any acceptable or is this is simple binary?

I’m doing this exercise to illustrate that even with fairly well defined classes, contexts and caveats, plus a very short list of traits, features and criteria, your classification leaves a lot of room for individual discernment and judgement. Thus, if this is used for a prescriptive purpose, one must know at which dose it is medicine and at which it is poison.

By default alone one can easily scrub out the difference between a good girl vs a bad girl. The optical and vision cues are as follows. The cheap way they dress, what they speak about/curse easily, and if they nag. ( my version of woman-explaining) Besides, bad girls always tell on themselves as a brag. They never want to be treated well by any *good man* thus, they are not use to excellent treatment and are in constant drama with everyone and everything. But bad girls want to hang out with good girls as a construct, but will use the *better* person for their own personal use and gain. As the saying goes, you are who you hang out with and so on.

I don’t know if I agree with the Whole Food vs. Walmart example as one can always dress up a pig, but never come close enough in order to smell it. Evidently, because a bad girl purchases a Chanel purse or wears designer clothes does not quality her a classy lady. Besides, Amazon has now encompassed Whole Foods, and I would not qualify Whole Foods as a front runner anymore as they will start a slight landslide within the next few years.

There is of course the exception to every rule relating to females through few and very far between.

Perhaps the real question is, do men want good/nice girls any more when they sleep with loose or destructive females? I understand a man’s binary need, but ask purely out of curiosity.

I believe we must consider a further context. When we consider whether girls are good or bad, we must also consider their purpose. Good girls are good for what? Bad girls are bad for what?
For example, good girls could be defined as good for LTR’s or marriage. Bad girls are not. On the other hand, good girls are bad for ONS’s, because they are unlikely to put out. Whereas bad girls are good for ONS, because they deliver what you expect.
Within another context, girls with a high libido could be defined as good girls, because they’ll never leave you disappointed in bed. But the same girls are also bad girls because they are less likely to be faithful.
We could also define girls who are frigid to be bad girls, because they’ll always leave you frustrated and looking for a lover with more passion. However, these same girls could be classified as good, because they probably won’t cheat on you.
Going further, prostitutes could be considered good business partners. Wives could be considered bad friends. So on…
Moreover, in the absence of ethos and pathos (which your blog pursues), the definitions of good and bad lose much of their meaningfulness. If you wish to continue your analysis of “good” girls vs “bad” girls, then you’ll also need to delve into ethos and pathos. An exploration of this limitation may or may not be something you wish to pursue.